Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Light

Kathy smiled. She’d wondered if Jason Cicero had actually been one of Tiberius’s dead brothers, but apparently not. A third-tier Family Member was somewhere in-between, trusted to handle matters that couldn’t be left to outsiders, rewarded and feted to the best of the Family’s considerable ability, but not often offered real power. Their birth made them part of the Family, but not important parts of the Family. Several thousand such young aristocrats had joined the Provisional Government after the end of the war, seeing it as a chance to carve out wealth and power for themselves without having to kowtow to first-tier members who’d gained their positions through an accident of birth.

“I discovered I was good at it,” Cordova continued. His voice grew more confident as he remembered. “I might have gotten into the Academy because of who my Family were, but I tried to make them proud and I was good at it, really I was. I graduated third in my class and there was no influence used to give me that position. They knew I was that good.”

Kathy nodded. The Imperial Navy’s series of academies for senior officers were political to a terrifying degree, often graduating complete incompetents because of who they were, or whom they were related to. Colin hadn’t graduated well, she recalled, even though going by scores alone he should have been in the top ten. Others, such as Admiral Percival, had been told repeatedly that their Family Names meant more to the Academy than skill or competence. The smarter ones tended to find clients to help them carry out the duties they were so ill-prepared to carry out. The hatreds that ran through the Academy were legends…

“I earned my position,” Cordova said. “I didn’t know that they were not going to allow me anywhere near a superdreadnaught squadron, but even when I realised that I would never be allowed to rise above Captain, I didn’t care. I became a Midshipman, and then a Lieutenant and then a Commander… and finally they made me Captain of a light cruiser. I met Admiral Percival along the way and I think I embarrassed him a bit.”

Kathy snorted. Admiral Percival had been beyond embarrassment. His incompetence had been the subject of private whispers and jokes among the Imperial Navy before Colin had rebelled, taken a superdreadnaught squadron from one of his clients, and then killed him at Harmony. Now, he was used as a textbook case of what not to do at the new Imperial Academy. It was, she’d decided long ago, better than he deserved.

“And for a few years I was happy,” Cordova continued. He sounded happier too. “We patrolled the Rim, we chased down and killed pirates and we watched as the Empire continued to expand. I spent years hunting down Captain Morgan and his infamous Morgan’s Hold, but it was my victory in the end… and I loved it. There was no chance of promotion, but I didn’t care! I had a good ship and a good crew — and we punched out a heavy cruiser once in an exercise, which probably took about ten years off everyone’s life — and we were happy.”

Kathy saw, behind his torn face, a image of the Captain he had once been and smiled. The Empire wouldn’t want to risk putting someone so competent in a senior position — the last person they’d trusted in a sensitive position had been Janice Windsor, who had made herself Empress with the support and backing of Home Fleet — but Cordova hadn’t shared Colin’s burning ambition and resentment. He’d been happy with the cards he’d been dealt… so what had gone so wrong?

He looked up at her. “And then I got priority orders,” he said. “I was to take the John Rayland to this world, right on the edge of the Rim. The orders didn’t allow me any leeway. I was to investigate the world, prove or disprove a report that had been filed with Imperial Intelligence… and if the world was what the report claimed it was, I was to scorch it without further ado. They gave me the mission, I think, because of who I was. They trusted me to carry it out without question.

“We should have known, we should have prepared for it,” he said, breaking off. “They were spacefarers after all. Macore’s fleet went further, so why couldn’t they?

“And we found the world. It only took one look to know what we were dealing with, a harmless world, but one under a sentence of death. I refused. They were completely harmless. No space flight, barely anything beyond water-powered junk, no threat at all. I could have blown them to dust and ash and they wouldn’t have a hope of hitting back. I said that it was pointless. We never even figured out how to talk to them. We might have more success without the pressure of the war.”

“But…”

He ignored her. “I didn’t realise at the time,” he explained. “I didn’t understand the pressures involved. I told them no and that was a mistake. They ordered me to scorch the world and sent a squadron of battlecruisers along to enforce their decision. A completely harmless world, far less dangerous than Gaul, burned to ash.”

Kathy stared at him. “But why?” She asked. It made no sense to her. Why would the Empire destroy a possibly-valuable assert. A developed colony world was almost priceless, with or without the original inhabitants. “Why did they want to wipe out such a harmless world?”

“Don’t you understand?” Cordova asked, almost pleading. “They weren’t rebels, or traitors, or missing colonists. They weren’t even human . They were Dathi ! They were Dathi and I wanted to spare their lives!”

Dathi!

Kathy felt herself recoil at the mere mention of the name. Dathi ! The second alien race humanity had met and the first external enemy. The alien race that had introduced itself to the human race by trying to exterminate it. The implacable and unreasonable foe that had destroyed planets and habitats alike, ruthlessly unconcerned about casualties or even practicalities. The very picture of the hopelessly alien force, beyond all communication… and reason. The Dathi, humanity’s greatest enemy and humanity’s greatest victory, wiped out over a thousand years ago.

Or so everyone had thought.

She heard herself stammering even as she spoke. “They were destroyed,” she protested, numbly. She had braced herself for terrifying revelations involving rape, or child abuse, or something else that might have fitted the case, not this. No one could have even conceived of such a thing. “They’re all dead.”

“By now, I’m sure that they are,” Cordova said. He sounded oddly amused, and yet relieved, by her response. “They’ll have sent out someone with Admiral Percival’s level of intelligence and willingness to contemplate genocide. The world will have been scorched and then bombarded with asteroids and then declared off-limits, just to hide what happened there. They needn’t have bothered. Hardly anyone would have gone there in any case.”

Kathy stared at him. It all made a terrifying kind of sense. The Dathi were the nightmares that lurked in humanity’s past, the very backbone of the Empire’s campaign of fear against other alien races… and their sole claim to power. The histories she’d learned from her father and others from the Thousand Families, as opposed to the cut and dried histories spoon-fed to the commoners, showed that the Dathi had been the catalyst behind the Empire. The Federation and the Outsiders, united against the greater threat, had merged to become the Empire… and the Thousand Families, the massive corporations that had pushed humanity into space, had taken the helm. The Dathi were, quite literally, the Empire’s reason for being…

And one of their own had tried to spare Dathi lives.

The very concept shocked her, even though cold logic told her that Cordova had been right. A pastoral world, without any technology capable of reaching space, could be no threat to the Empire. Even if they had had spaceflight, they wouldn’t have had the sheer power required to shake the Empire, although Colin had proven that they wouldn’t have needed that much power… or perhaps they would. Colin had had popular appeal, speaking to those who had been pushed aside and trodden on by the Empire and the Dathi wouldn’t have had that. They were, very much, an equal-opportunity threat.